Folia archeologica 53.

István Vida: Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, Hungary, Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, Vol. III. Moesia Inferior, Supplement 1, Nicopolis ad Istrum

94 L.T. YABLONSKY Fig. 8. Golden decorations of a cloak from grave 4 8. ábra. A kaítán aranydíszei, 4. sír Under the vessels there was a small purse-basket woven of thin twigs, under which the following objects were found: a bone spoon with engraved (animal style) handle, an iron knife with cast silver handle, decorated with the relief depiction of a deer with antlers, a fragment of an iron object covered with a thick golden plate, wooden handles of whips with ornamented, cylindrical, hollow, golden details. Some objects were situated around the fire-place. They included a half-spherical glass cup, two large bronze figurines of rams, small golden sewn plates with profiled stamped depictions of a lion, a cross shaped stamped large golden plate depicting ram-heads joining in the centre (view from above). * * * For almost thousand years, early nomads, known in the ancient literary sources as „Sarmatians", dominated the steppes of Eastern Europe. They were the contemporaries of the Scythian Kingdom, and later became one of the reasons (according to Diodorus Siculus II. 43) of its fall in the 3rd century B.C. The militancy of the Sarmatians was recorded not only in written sources, but also evidenced by archaeology. Objects of armament and horse-harness are the most frequent finds in the male burials of Sarmatian type. Weaponry is frequently found also in female graves that attests to the data of ancient Greek sources on the armed Amazon women who fought as well as men. Militant Sarmatian hordes played an outstanding role in the formation of the ethnopolitical situation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia not only in the Early Iron Age, but also in the Early Medieval times.